


Perpetual Motion Machine

by altschmerzes



Series: Whumptober 2020 [1]
Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Autistic Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016), Blood and Injury, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Restraints, Team as Family, Whump, Whumptober 2020, not wholly materially relevant but heavily implied and leaned on in writing this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:42:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26750812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altschmerzes/pseuds/altschmerzes
Summary: Watching via video link sent to them after Mac was taken, Riley finds herself fixated on one specific detail of the whole horrible situation: Mac's hands. He's been restrained in such a way that he can't move them at all, and the sight of it is enough to nearly make her sick.Finding him is the easy part. Getting the mess of handcuffs and duct tape off when Mac's almost too drugged and freaked out to realize who they are? Not so much.(Written for Whumptober 2020 day 1: waking up restrained.)
Relationships: Jack Dalton & Riley Davis & Angus MacGyver, Riley Davis & Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016)
Series: Whumptober 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1964482
Comments: 32
Kudos: 138
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	Perpetual Motion Machine

**Author's Note:**

> we'll see how long i'm able to keep up with whumptober but [rises like mushu from the mists] i'm alive! and writing again! please enjoy... this. as could be the free space on 'gav altschmerzes fic bingo' it is much longer than i planned on it being.

The trouble with being asked to choose between two bad options is, when you only have experience with one of them, it’s easier to say you’d prefer the other. People can say what they will about the devil you know, but Riley will always go for the devil she doesn’t, because at least then she can tell herself it would be better if things weren’t the way they were right now. So if someone had, before that day, presented Riley with a scenario where one of her friends is missing and asked if she would prefer to be able to watch what was happening with him or be kept in the dark, she would pick being able to watch every time.

Except, now Riley knows better. Now Riley _is_ watching, and the trouble with knowing exactly what’s happening to someone while they’re missing and completely out of reach of help is that there’s nothing you can do about it _but_ know. 

At first, there had been something to do. While Jack and Matty were running down their part of the search, focusing on the area Mac had been grabbed from, Riley had taken the link they’d been sent which opened the live video feed and started coding. The program she’d written to backtrace the broadcasting signal was good work, she’ll say so herself, and under better circumstances she’d probably be crowing about it. She’d cannibalized pieces of other projects idling on her rig and put together a digital bloodhound that was, she’d say if she’d written it for any less terrifying reason, rather sexy in its sleek efficiency. But even as beautiful as the work is, it isn’t magic, and these things take time. So once those first electric minutes have slipped away under her keyboard and strings of cascading commands and botnets, Riley is left with a lot of empty time to sit at home base and stare at screens.

On one, there is a string of code, mutating and morphing as it chases down one polymorphic signal footprint after the other, leaping from the tail end of one as soon as the lead runs dry to the next subsequent ping. It’s a self-directing program, needing no active interference barring something wildly unexpected happening, and so Riley need only monitor it and ensure that nothing wildly unexpected _does_ happen, ready to pin down the location and phone Jack and Matty when it finally uncovers where Mac is being held. That’s the screen of her main rig, set up on the table. The other screen is larger and far more horrifying to watch. 

Up on the wall of the war room, where she’s seen countless digital dossiers and grid-laid maps projected as they prepare for their latest assignment, is the feed from the camera watching Mac. Riley is grateful that Matty had tinted out the glass walls before she left, because she doesn’t know what she would do if she had to deal with random Phoenix personnel stopping and gawking in at the horrifying video currently holding her attention captive. It’s bad enough already, alone in this room with this window into what’s happening with Mac, depicted in a clarity and sharpness that makes Riley wish, in one of the strangest thoughts she’s ever had, that their bad guys of the week would have sprung for a camera with a lower resolution. Of the things she would like to be able to see in crisp high def, this is not on the list. 

Mac is alone in a room without many distinguishing features that might help them identify where he’s being held. He’s laying on the ground on his side, facing away from the camera, which is set high on the wall at an angled bird’s eye vantage point, and he doesn’t appear to be conscious. The one thing Riley is grateful for, in considering the clarity of the feed, is that she can see that, motionless and prone as he is, Mac is still breathing. Were it not for being able to see his side rising and falling, shallow and slow but steady, she wouldn’t be entirely certain he was still alive at all, which is an option she can hardly bear to think of. It was watching this, eyes fixed on the movement of his side as he breathes in those first few empty minutes after her program had begun its work and all she was left with was an empty room and that live feed, that Riley first noticed it. 

Mac’s hands. 

That they are bound at all isn’t unusual. This isn’t the first time Mac has been abducted since Riley’s known him and she’s seen the marks he wears for days after Jack inevitably finds him and brings him home to them, the bracelets of bruising that bear testament to how hard he’d struggled against whatever had been used to restrain him. She always tries not to stare and he always catches her staring anyway, flashing her a reassuring little grin and telling her not to worry, it would fade quickly and soon enough it would be like it never happened at all. The words are accompanied by Mac lifting his hands, wiggling his fingers in the air to prove some kind of a point, and it works, because it always makes Riley laugh and shake her head at him. Trust Mac to try and make other people feel better about the damage done to him.

This time, though, the sight of them makes Riley feel like she’s going to be sick. Mac’s arms are wrenched uncomfortably behind his back, in a way that she’s sure is going to leave him with a sore shoulder from the awkward position it forces him to lay in on the ground, and his hands are bound there by a mechanism it takes Riley several long moments to identify. She squints at the feed and studies the clunky, misshapen silhouette of Mac’s hands, outline distorted and strange, until it hits her like she’s been sucker punched. 

It’s tape. There’s fat strips of silver duct tape wrapped around and around Mac’s hands, mummifying them into grotesque mittens. Sharp protrusions and glimpses of brighter, shinier silver shows that underneath the tape, handcuffs are locked around Mac’s wrists. Because she knows him as well as she does by now, Riley can imagine how it happened. She can see in her mind's eye the moment Mac’s abductors caught him twisting his wrists, fumbling for the locking mechanism in the cuffs, moments from escaping them when he’d been discovered. The tape is clumsily if thoroughly applied, frustration evident in the lopsided layering of it, strips on top of strips until Mac’s brilliant, inventor’s hands are almost completely obscured from sight. 

Seeing his hands like that, hands that are always moving, flitting from one thing to another, threading through piles of miscellaneous junk and finding the gold nobody else can see, fiddling and wandering and twisting around each other in idle moments, it feels so completely wrong that it makes Riley’s own hands tingle in sympathetic restlessness. She flexes them a few times, shaking out her fingers the way she’s seen Mac do dozens of times over, flicking them through the air in the hopes that she can dislodge the horrible pins-and-needles feeling prickling her skin as she looks at the macabre cocoon of tape and metal. Of all things, to target Mac’s _hands_ just seems inhumanly cruel, stripping him of one of the things that makes him the most _him,_ and Riley feels the backs of her eyes sting.

“We’re coming for you, Mac,” she mutters under her breath. The words are quiet but they sound unnaturally loud in the otherwise empty, silent room. “We’re coming for you, hang tight. It’ll be over before you know it.” They’re hollow promises, no way to know for certain she’ll be able to honor them, but she figures she’s allowed to make them. It’s not like Mac can hear her, and it brings Riley some measure of comfort to say it, even if she’s the only one there to hear. 

When Mac starts to wake up, resurfacing from whatever drug or blow to the head had rendered him unconscious to begin with, Riley notices immediately. The first movement comes from his hands. The tape covered lump twitches and jerks a little, his wrists attempting to separate without conscious thought behind them. Riley catches the motion and watches, stomach churning and heart thudding in her throat, as he rises into awareness in a series of progressively panicked spasms. 

“Mac,” she half-says, half-gasps when a particularly violent twist of his torso flashes the tape in the low light of the room serving as his prison and she sees the glint of something dark and wet. He’s bleeding, the cuffs under the tape having at some point likely bitten through skin as, only partially aware of his surroundings, he struggles against the restraints. “Mac, stop.”

When she’d thought before of how horribly unnatural it was to see Mac so still, hands pinned and trapped so securely, this isn’t what Riley had in mind as an alternative. Despite the blood now slicked across the tape in thickening streaks and his increasingly desperate thrashing, it doesn’t seem to be coming any looser.

“You’re hurting yourself,” Riley tells the image of him, like it might actually get through to him and make him stop fighting so hard. “Please, Mac, you’re bleeding, just _stop.”_

Eventually, he does stop. Mac either gains enough lucidity to know that he’s just making things worse by struggling the way he is or he exhausts himself, running out of energy to keep it up. For whatever the reason, Mac finally goes limp on the ground, completely still once more save for the heave of worn out breaths and the occasional twitch of his arms, clearly involuntary tremors shivering down his shoulders to his tape-covered hands. Riley herself feels drained just looking at him. Her own shoulders have started to ache, a combination of sympathy pain from seeing the obvious strain in his and the tension that’s manifested in her physically from the emotional impact of having to sit here, helpless, while someone she loves suffers. 

Just when she thinks she might not be able to take it anymore, the program she wrote throws up a string of data that stabilizes and solidifies, pulsing at the top of her screen in a triumphant glow, and just like that, they know where he is.

Riley is already headed out to the parking lot when Jack answers the phone. She’s got her open computer balanced in one hand, the video feed of Mac split-screened with the digital gold at the end of her cyber rainbow, phone held up to her ear as she speed-walks to her car as quickly as possible while also managing not to fall flat on her face.

“I’ve got him,” she says breathlessly as soon as the ringing ends and Jack’s side of the call clicks open. “I’ve got him, I found him, it’s done.” Rattling off the address of the coordinates she’s identified, Riley tells him she’ll meet him and Matty there and then hangs up without affording him so much as the opportunity to try and tell her she needs to stay behind. She’s not sure that’s what would have happened, but even the remote possibility of being told she has to once again sit idle and wait while somewhere out there, Jack goes to rescue Mac without her is unacceptable. The very thought of it makes her stomach flip, so she grits her teeth, deposits her computer carefully open into the passenger’s seat of her car, and starts driving.

At the location itself, Riley provides Jack and Matty with no more opportunity to deny her the right to go in with them than she’d allowed on the phone. 

“I’m coming,” she says, voice iron and jaw so tense it makes the words come out ground strangely around the edges. “I’m coming in with you, and you’re not going to stop me.”

Not ‘you can’t’, not ‘please don’t.’ _You’re not going to stop me._ And they don’t. Glancing briefly next to her at Jack, who nods once, short and sharp, Matty turns back to Riley and nods too. 

The tactical team that had been hot on Riley’s heels on the way are left to deal with Mac’s abductors while Riley follows Jack straight to the room at the back of the narrow, rundown house. It isn’t locked aside from a single deadbolt on the outside of it, and Riley has to look away while Jack gets it open. Watching the way he can’t quite get ahold of the small latch on the first try, adrenaline and anxiety making him fumble it, is more than she can bear and she swallows back nausea, staring at the floor until she hears the bolt click and the door swing wide. 

As it turns out, seeing the crude cruelty that’s been inflicted on Mac is no easier in person than it had been on video. In fact, it’s worse, because now Riley can smell the faint coppery tang of blood in the air, hear the small sounds Mac can’t quite stifle as he whips around on the floor, prone body jackknifing, trying to see who it is that’s come into the room that had, for however short a time, served as his prison. 

The relief on Mac’s face when he sees who it is, processes that the man going to his knees next to him is Jack, the woman crouched on his other side Riley, is pulverizing to witness. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. His body language says it all for him. Mac’s eyes shut and he goes limp, head dropping to the floor while his torso rolls forward, allowing himself to slump into a posture that takes some of the strain off his arms and shoulders but leaves him more vulnerable to a potential attack. It also has the effect of putting the mess of tape and metal that’s been made of his hands directly in Riley’s line of sight, and something in her snaps.

“Get it off him,” she says, reaching for him, flinching at the same time he does when she takes ahold of his shaking, tense forearm. “Jack, get it off him, his hands, you have to- Please, his _hands.”_

“Easy,” Jack says, talking to Mac instead of responding to her directly with the exception of a flick of his eyes, meeting hers for a split second of mirrored distress before going straight back down to both of their present top priority. “Keep still for me for a minute, okay, buddy? I’m gonna get this shit off you pronto, you just gotta help me out. That’s it.” 

So much of Riley’s attention is fixed on Mac that she hadn’t seen it when Jack had reached into one of the pockets of his tac vest and removed the knife. She does hear it though when it snaps open, a harsh sound that prompts another flinch from both of them and a startled sound of strangled panic from Mac. His head has jerked back up off the floor and he’s staring, wide-eyed and panting, at the blade.

“It’s okay,” soothes Jack, holding the knife out away from Mac’s body. 

It doesn’t help much. Mac’s still staring, eyes fixed on the object like it’s the only thing he’s seeing. There’s a hazy look to them that leads Riley to believe he had indeed been drugged, an assumption contributed to by the lack of an obvious head injury. Jack must come to the same conclusion she does, because he hesitantly sets the knife down, holding up his empty palms in a placating gesture. 

“Wh’s,” Mac says, the word slurred through clumsy lips. Definitely drugged. His shoulders jerk a little and Riley squeezes his forearm, trying to do anything she can to calm and ground him. “What’s going on, I-” His head lifts higher off the floor, craning his neck at an awkward angle from where he’s still slumped on the ground like a puppet whose strings have been slashed with a straight razor. Sluggish eyes slide from the knife on the floor up to where Jack kneels next to him then back down again, seemingly unable to pick a direction to focus in. 

“Mac, hey, it’s us.” Jack’s voice is raised just slightly above his usual speaking register, clear and firm in an obvious attempt to catch and hang onto Mac’s jittery attention. “It’s Jack and Riley, c’mon, there’s nobody here that’s gonna hurt you. Not anymore. Matty and company are in the other room kickin’ ass and takin’ names, and Ri and me are here to get all this crap off your hands so we can take you on back home. We can’t transport you like this, it’s just gonna mess up your wrists worse, so we’re just gonna take care of it now. Sound good to you?”

For a long, tense moment, Mac doesn’t respond. He just breathes in quick, shallow pants and frowns anxiously at the two people hovering over him. Riley rubs her thumb over his arm in slow, steady strokes. She’s not entirely sure which of them she’s trying to comfort by doing this, but she hopes it’ll end up being both. One of Jack’s hands lowers slowly from its position of nonverbal surrender, descending until it lands on Mac’s side, palm pressed flat over where his uneven breathing sends his ribcage lurching up and down. Riley can feel Mac flinch for a second time as soon as he is touched, but Jack doesn’t immediately withdraw. He maintains contact until Mac’s breaths slow and calm, some clarity returning to agitated blue eyes. 

“Okay?” Jack asks eventually. Hesitating only momentarily, Mac gives a slow, wobbly nod, and Jack nods back, repeating, “Okay.” 

On her life, Riley doesn’t know how Jack does it. He’s got something of a reputation for being a goofball prone to dramatics but she knows better. She’s seen him like _this_ , how he reacts when things actually do go seriously wrong. There’s a composure Jack manages to pull over himself when things really get bad, a steel calm that has a contagious effect on those around him. When Jack seems to think that somehow, some way, things are going to turn out right, come hell or high water, it becomes easy to look at his collected determination and believe him. That’s what Riley is hanging onto right now as she shifts on the floor, preparing to help Jack lift Mac up into a sitting position. 

Just as she’s about to try and heave him upright, though, Jack stops her with a small shake of his head and an arc of his free hand through the air just out of Mac’s field of vision. Riley frowns, confused and nauseated by the growing dread sitting heavy in her stomach. 

“Mac,” Jack says in a carefully toneless voice rather than answering her unasked question directly. “The tape around your hands is on there real good and there’s a lot of it. So I can be sure I don’t hurt you getting it off, I can’t let you sit up while I work on it. Do you understand what I’m asking? You’re gonna need to lay real still while I cut through it, and then before you know it, we’ll be all done and we can get you out of here. Okay?” As he asks the question, Jack sweeps his palm up and down Mac’s side. 

Whether the gesture is an attempt at comfort or a wordless apology Riley doesn’t know, but it seems to help, because Mac gives another tiny nod and says, voice tight and wavering, “Just do it.” 

With careful help from both Jack and Riley, Mac ends up laid fully face down on the floor, head turned to the side so that his cheek is pressed to the worn but thankfully mostly clean hardwood. His face is pale and expression grim and obviously unnerved by the extremely vulnerable position in which he’s been forced, but he doesn’t seem to be in any more pain than before, which is a small mercy. It also helps that, thankfully, once he’d gotten ahold of his surroundings, where he was and who was with him, Mac seems to have maintained a decent grip on lucidity. Riley can only imagine how much worse this already bad situation would be going if they had to contend with Mac panicking all over again after they’d finally gotten him calmed down and focused.

While Jack takes a deep breath and sets the knife to the first layer of duct tape, somehow maintaining his mask of stoicism despite needing to swipe fresh blood away from the material so that his knife didn’t slip in it and cut either him or Mac, Riley settles down onto the floor on Mac’s other side. She rests a hand at the top of one shoulder, kneading lightly at the stiff, strained muscle both to remind Mac that she’s there and hopefully ease some of the pain he’s undoubtedly going to be in even higher amounts of when he’s finally released from the position that’s been putting so much stress on his body. 

There’s a skin-crawling ripping sound, fibers audibly separating as Jack’s knife drags through them, and Riley can feel Mac trembling under her hand. She knows intuitively that it’s not from the physical pain, the way the pulling of the blade through the tape must be disturbing where the cuffs underneath have dug into the skin of his wrists. The shaking is about something else, and she continues massaging at the tensed muscle under her touch, digging her fingertips into his shirt until she can feel the top of his collarbone over the curve of his shoulder. 

It’s slow and difficult work. The tape is practically fused onto itself in some places while others are slick with blood from Mac’s panicked struggling. From much closer up, it’s clear to see that the cuffs have torn into him badly, fresh blood leaking out through the gaps in the tape. No matter how careful Jack is, the pulling has to be causing Mac a great deal of pain. He’s unable to stop the small sounds that keep forcing their way out of him, though it sounds to Riley almost like he’s trying to muffle them against the floor. 

At what must be a particularly torturous twist of the tape as Jack wedges the knife in around where a nasty snarl of it has gotten caught around the hinge of the handcuffs, Mac loses his composure. In an involuntary, instinctive move, he tries to jerk away from the source of the agony, shoulders spasming as a massive tremor convulses down his spine. Jack has to pull the knife quickly away to avoid catching Mac’s forearm with it, and when Riley glances up at him she can see the powerless guilt in his eyes at being the cause of Mac’s suffering, even if there isn’t another option. 

The aftershocks of the sudden, pitchy sob that was pulled out of Mac with the attempt to escape their help shiver under Riley’s palm, and she doesn’t know how they’re going to get through this. Jack is barely a quarter done. She doesn’t know how much more Mac can take. Especially given that as soon as Jack lightly touches his taped over hands again he cringes hard into the floor, unable to suppress the sustained instinct to get away.

“Help him.” The instruction Jack hisses at her over Mac’s back is fierce and urgent and nothing Riley knows what to do with.

“How?” she demands, trying to keep quiet in return even as her voice pitches up in desperate helplessness. “What can I _possibly_ do to help him right now?”

“Figure something out.” Some of the solid composure that Riley had found so reassuring earlier has slipped, betraying exactly how deeply this is affecting Jack. His words have gone harsher than he usually speaks to her, the muscle of his jaw standing out as he clenches it while keeping his grip on the knife light and careful. “Because right now, with what I have to keep all my focus on, I can’t, so you have to. He needs you, Riley, so I don’t care what you do, but figure something out, and _help_ him.” 

Riley feels panic rising in her chest. She doesn’t know what to do, she doesn’t have the remotest idea how she could do anything to help Mac at all. 

When the thought occurs to her, she doesn’t waste a moment questioning it. Riley releases Mac’s shoulder, pushing past the instant regret when he makes a panicked little sound at the loss of contact, and scoots back. She shifts onto her knees and then stretches her legs out behind her, lowering herself completely to the floor until she’s laid out beside Mac on the ground. From her new vantage point, with his face turned towards her, Riley is square in Mac’s line of sight, his skittering, distressed gaze locking on her the moment he’s able to. Reaching out slowly, making sure he can see her hand the entire time, Riley swipes at his face with the cuff of her sleeve, clearing the damp of both tears and sweat from his flushed skin.

“We’re here,” she tells him, because she has nothing else to offer, nothing more comforting she can promise right now. “Jack and I are here, and it’s gonna be over soon, and we can all go home.”

“Okay.” It breathes unevenly out through trembling lips, but it’s a coherent word, and it’s all the permission Jack needed to keep going.

The entire time Jack continues working, removing layer after layer of sealed adhesive from Mac’s bound hands, Riley lays there on the floor next to him and does what she can to keep his focus off what’s happening. She rests her palm over the side of his neck, her thumb stroking the line of his jaw, and talks. If she were asked later she wouldn’t be able to recall what it was she’d said, exactly, but the content doesn’t matter. What matters is Riley’s voice giving Mac something to listen to other than the rip of sliced tape and his own labored breathing, her face in his line of sight giving him something to focus on even if he doesn’t maintain eye contact directly. Her hand on the overheated skin of his neck, gentle pressure providing input that doesn’t hurt. 

Eventually, it’s done. One of the members of the tac team pops in at some point to give the key to the cuffs to Jack, who then takes great care in pulling the thin bands of metal out away from the wounds they’d caused. Finally able to separate his wrists, Mac lowers his arms to his sides with the slow, awkward movements of someone who’s been restrained so long that moving them brings a fresh rush of pain. Jack rubs Mac’s stiff shoulders, trying to help ease the ache he’s surely feeling in them, while Riley just stays put. She’s resolved that she won’t be getting up off this floor until Mac does, and since he’s made no attempt to sit up, then she’s going to stay here too, for as long as it takes.

The realization that medical is becoming a familiar place is not one that Riley finds particularly welcome. Jack made a joke to a similar effect before he’d stepped out to fill out some paperwork with the main desk, commenting that he’d think by this point they’d just have stock forms for Mac ready to go.

“But nah,” he’d sighed, pushing himself out of his chair to his feet. Jack stooped a little to quickly tuck a wayward lock of blond hair back neatly behind Mac’s ear, thoughtless affection Riley would’ve missed if she’d blinked or looked away for a moment. Mac himself, though his eyes were closed and breathing slow, had obviously noticed, given the slight flush on his cheeks at the touch. “Gotta follow protocol or Dr. Bell’ll have my ass. You kids behave, huh?” He’d done the opposite to Riley on his way past, flicking a curl out over her face when he’d walked by her chair, leaving her to roll her eyes at the gesture.

Though Jack’s only been gone a few minutes, Riley already wishes he’d come back. She feels hypervigilance prickling at the back of her neck, left alone here with Mac in such an incapacitated state. It would be so much easier if they’d been able to take him home, somewhere he’d feel safe, somewhere they’d _all_ feel safe. But no. Medical wanted him to stay here and sleep it off for a while, because whatever he’d been drugged with had metabolized too fast to get a tox report on it, and nobody was entirely comfortable letting him out of the supervision of trained medical staff just yet. So here they are, Mac laid out in a bed with the lights dimmed to allow him to hopefully get some actual rest, Riley with her chair angled to the side to give her a clear view of both him and the frosted out sliding glass door to the hall.

Mac’s arms lay on top of the grey top blanket he’s been covered with, one folded gingerly over his stomach while the one closest to Riley lays out on top of the mattress, palm down beside his thigh. She can’t stop glancing over at the bandaging wrapped over his wrists, secured with surgical tape - a cruel twist of fate given it was tape on his hands and wrists that been so sickening to her not an hour ago. His hands themselves, bare and un-bandaged, are abraded in places where the adhesive and edges of the tape had chafed with his struggling, the skin reddened and irritated. Every so often Mac’s fingers flutter, flexing or curling on top of the blanket, his characteristic restlessness subdued by exhaustion and the remnants of the drug still clinging to his system.

Hesitantly, not quite sure why she feels like she needs to do it, Riley reaches out. Her own hand, tingling with phantom sympathy pains, hovers over Mac’s forearm for a long moment before she lowers it, touching him just above where the wrappings on his wrist begin. Mac’s fingers give a small twitch, all of them at once, and then relax completely, laying loose and still in a way they haven’t seemed since they’d first found him.

Looking at Mac’s face, Riley wonders if he’s still awake. The crease that had sat between his eyebrows since Jack left the room has faded, his face now free of any hint of a frown. Riley’s pinky finger sweeps out, brushing the bandaging, and Mac doesn’t react at all. Still unsure what’s driving her actions but figuring that following her instincts hasn’t let her down so far today, Riley moves her feather light grip farther down until her palm rests delicately over the back of his damaged hand. She watches his face intently, searching for any sign that her touch is hurting him and not finding any. If anything, it just relaxes him more, his face gone completely slack. 

Fondness prickles in Riley’s chest like heartache, stinging and warm. She leans her cheek against the back of her chair, glancing towards the door on autopilot before returning her focus back to her friend. His hand moves suddenly under hers and Riley is about to withdraw, certain the contact has just become abruptly too much, when Mac’s thumb curls up, catching the knuckle of one of her fingers. Riley adjusts her grip in return, loosely interlocking their hands and smiling lightly when his thumb twitches again, fiddling with the edge of her sleeve. 

Mac is a perpetual motion machine. Even completely at rest, he’s never still, fussing and playing and tinkering with anything in reach. Seeing it now, his peaceful face and lax muscles combined with the lazy way he twists the edge of his thumb into the fabric of her sleeve, it unknots something in Riley’s chest. It makes her feel like things are going to be okay.


End file.
